An Aussie's adventures in quilting

Menu

Liberty Love

Last week, while drugged up on cold and flu medication, I decided to play with my small stash of Liberty fabrics. I started slowly collecting fabric just over a year a go, when a darling friend gave me two Liberty lawn fat quarters as a thank you present.

For those of you not familiar with the fabric it is a light weight, beautiful cotton that comes in the most fabulous designs and is made by the famous British store Liberty of London….Ironically I have bought quite a bit of stuff at Liberty in my time in England but never went to the fabric section!

I had originally popped my Liberty cherry with the sample pillow for my Introduction to Paper Piecing class at Modern Domestic (my main Liberty enabler!).

This 16 inch star used some bigger slices of my stash but I loved how the delicate Liberty fabric plays against the Essex linen.

Anyway this week I had the crazy idea to make some mini dresden plate flowers with my Liberty stash. I wanted to go small because I also had a collection of 21/2 inch squares that my darling BF had bought back for me from London…and I wanted hand work because it meant I did not have to leave the couch. The end result was this…

The finished 16 point flower is 5 inches wide.

Somewhere during this process my husband declared that I had officially gone crazy and I think he might be right. I have made up a little travel kit and I am now obsessed with making these things….

I found a pattern sheet on-line at AMC-Quilts that I used (LINK HERE)… their PDF pattern was the perfect size and I just printed it on card stock and cut out the petal pieces and started to sew.

I am not sure what I am going to do with them but for now I am happy to just make away.

Lovely Dresdens! I loved the fabric section of Liberty. It’s the only part of the store I remember (aside from the exterior). Of course you’ll head straight for it next time you’re in London, won’t you?

I know what you mean . . .making the pieces is like eating potato chips . . .can’t do just one. I’m working on a G’mother’s Flower Garden with 1″ hexies. I’m addicted too! Thanks for the pattern. I’m getting ready for a knee replacement next month and need something to do with my hands.

Eeek! Cue spooky music. I’m only making dresden plates for the corners on my latest quilt. Not as cutely tiny, and much more like plates in that the centres are larger, but still. Yours are gorgeous, and need to be appliqued immediately to a white background to show off the colours and patterns. There really is something madly addictive about hand stitching and paper templates, whether it’s hexies or dresdens, and they are particularly gorgeous in Liberty lawn.

These are so lovely! I recently cut into my (mini-mini-) stash of Liberty fabrics for the first time, and I am already on the hunt for more. They are just lovely, especially the way that you’ve put them together on those dresdens!

Wow, you never cease to amaze me! Love, love this project. And the timing is perfect because I was looking for a small hand project. I was so excited you left a link! So to be clear…the template you used was the one in your link? It said something like…makes 27 with three left over…which sounds like 8 petals to a plate. I’m missing something because you have 16 petals. Am I to assume cutting two at a time per petal template? You are EPPing, correct? Are you leaving templates in till each plate completed?sorry so many questions!

Mary i was confused by the directions on the template too, but did not worry about it too much as i was not making things they way they do. I get one flower and a few left overs per sheet. I have been cutting the petals out on the inner line, there is a lot of excess cardboard but it was the best pattern i could find on line. I am keeping my cardboard in till i am ready to sew the dresdens down, just so they maintain their shape.

Thanks so much for posting this! I was wondering the same things as Mary- I too was confused by the directions. Your little Liberty dresdens are adorable! I can’t wait to start a little project with these. Thanks for sharing that link.

Christin these linen and Liberty projects are not destined for washing really…so I did not pre-wash or back the Liberty (both of which are recommended approaches). I would approach a Liberty quilt differently.

I like your kind of officially gone crazy… I’ve never been a fan of dresden plate patterns and I’ve not been particularly keen to embrace yet another style of quilting but looking at your pictures, I hear the “dark side” calling. Maybe I’ll add it to a someday list.

Love the hand work idea. I have been working on Aqua and orange Hexies for a year. This would be a nice break. Did you glue your template to your fabric? In your travel kit you have fabric and templates together in the upper right pocket perfectly matched up. Have you considered doing a tutorial? That would be helpful for newbies like me. Thanks! Glad your feeling better. I had that bug last week too. Ugh!

Ann. I do glue baste my template and fabric together using a generic glue stick. I find it easy to remove the cardboard at the end because I also punch a hole in my template. With this project I have been using really stiff cardboard, scrap booking card stock actually which seems to have helped me when working with this delicate fabric.

Hi Laura. I will put a photo of the back of my mini Dresdens up in Instagram for you…they won’t let me add it to this comment unfortunately. It will appear in the side scroll if my blog. Hope that helps.

Thank you for your response! I don’t have Instagram but I poked around YouTube and I think I’ve got it figured out. Now I’m getting ready to sew some and I’m thinking I cut my pieces wrong. I cut on the solid lines. Should they be cut on the dotted lines for the five inch finish? Would it work with the bigger pieces? They look like 16 go together but the hole in the center is quite large.

Older Posts

Instagram Feed

My faves:

You might also like:

(c) Cath Hall and Wombat Quilts 2012-2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site's author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used provided that clear credit is given to Wombat Quilts with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.